


one day I'll be sand on a beach by the sea

by hypotheticalfanfic



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, POV Sansa, Queen Sansa, Sansa-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-05-24 03:13:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6139402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypotheticalfanfic/pseuds/hypotheticalfanfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sansa Stark, Queen in the North; heavy is the head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	one day I'll be sand on a beach by the sea

“She-wolf,” they call her these days. Not where anyone can hear, mind, they’re not stupid, but in taverns where they feel safe enough to complain, to talk their nonsense about raising the bannermen again, they call her “she-wolf,” “wolf cunt,” “cold bitch,” anything they can think of to make her sound small and weak and lesser. Don’t they know, Sansa wonders, that she-wolves are more dangerous than the males? Don’t they know that she hears everything, sees everything, knows everything in the North and most things in the South, too, these days?

She sighs, grants a farmer’s widow a tract of good land and a few orphans to foster, and breathes deeply. She smiles graciously at the next petitioner, nods her heavy head, and sips the light summer mead the Westerlings are so proud of. She breathes in the salt air, breathes in the scent of browning bread, breathes in and thinks about home. The smell of the North still pierces her heart sometimes: snow and cold, silver-edged trees, ash and smoke in the wind - probably that last is all in her head, but Winterfell’s ruins are still there, it’s not impossible. The crypt had been huge, a fire could still be burning there for all she knew. For all she knew, which wasn’t much.

She’d left the ruins standing, a black gash on the white snow. _Let the North remember_ , she had said when Willas had asked why. _Let the last shreds of House Lannister quiver in their hiding places, knowing that their debts are still unpaid_. The Wolf’s Den in White Harbor would serve well enough until that day. It had taken nearly a full summer to turn the decrepit old building back into a noble house, working day and night with every skilled artisan and carpenter whose banners once had hung with her father’s. The Den’s long life as a prison had scarred it, left some rooms still nearly unusable, but the building itself meant too much to tear down or leave for others. The Wolf’s Den was the old North, it was the Stark blood, it was the reclamation of the past. It was not, would never be, Winterfell, but the Starks and the North and the world would never be the same either, so it seemed fitting.

Her seat at the Wolf’s Den would never be her father’s grand chair in Winterfell. Her seat - not a throne, exactly, but more than a bench - sat tucked beneath the weirwood tree in the Wolf’s Den central garden, as it had for the last two summers, as it would until winter came again. This was a balmy enough summer, and the wind dancing through the red leaves sounded like Bran’s laughter. She closed her eyes and tried to see him. It didn’t work, of course; she hadn’t seen Bran for winters and summers past counting. After the Long Winter, after the War of Five Kings and what happened next, she’d never seen Bran again, not as a human. Rickon had taken her once to the tree where Bran had become…whatever he was now. Something more. She’d pressed one hand to the snow-white bark, felt nothing, and turned away. “My brother is a tree,” she’d thought to herself, and had held back the giggling both out of respect and a fear that Rickon might think her mad. He, a scant nine summers younger than she but seeming like a child still, had happily chatted to the tree as if Bran sat laughing with him.

Rickon, now known mostly as Rickon Skagosi or, if the speaker wanted not to be stabbed with a dragonglass sword, Rickon Stoneborn, was in his heart the small boy he’d been when everything had gone to ruin. He’d never quite changed. Sansa wondered, sometimes, if he would have grown up like that anyway, regardless of who was king or wasn’t or was again, or if it had been the turmoil of the times that had shaped him. She couldn’t really remember how he had been before, so it was idle thought in the end. She tossed him an apple where he sat running a brush through Shaggydog’s coat, looking for all the world like a young boy again. His smile was clear and easy, and she felt a sharp pang of envy at the stillness he must feel in his mind. His head, too, was never ringed with pain like hers was now. She only wore the bronze crown on occasions of import, because after a day’s wear her neck felt like worn-out leather and her head ached for a week. Today would leave her shaking like a leaf as two of the girls put the crown in its rosewood box.

The bronze crown - that had been an argument. For a moment, standing in King’s Landing after the Great War, she and Jon had been children again, fighting over a lemon cake or a new blanket or the right to sneak the next sip of wine. Then they had realized what they were doing, fighting over a trinket, and had wept together. She had taken the bronze crown of the Kings in the North (“It should stay in the North,” Jon had agreed at last) and its twin had been forged for him from Valyrian steel by the heat of his consort’s dragons. He did not call himself the King, although his consort was undoubtedly the Queen. He still called himself Jon Snow most of the time; sometimes it was Jon Snow of the North, especially in scholars’ texts, but mostly he was just Jon. To the children, to the survivors of the Wars, to his surviving sisters, just Jon, as if nothing had ever changed from when they were children laughing in front of the home fire.

She still struggles, Sansa knows, with saying the name. Daenerys Targaryen sounded like an old-times Targaryen, like a storybook, like the dragon riders Arya had loved when they were young and silly. Sansa and the Queen had met only a few times, and each had been uncomfortable. Daenerys was kind enough, but Sansa had clung to Margaery and to Rickon, and had made no overtures in the white-haired khaleesi’s direction. The discomfort seemed to have been mutual: although Daenerys always accompanied Jon on his infrequent visits to White Harbor, she spent most of the visit tending to her dragons or young Aemon, the wildling prince-to-be. Though Aemon lived more often than not at Horn Hill with the wildling woman and Jon’s maester friend, he toured the South enough that Daenerys shepherded him as a doting aunt would. The South, Sansa reflected, had become an even more confusing place, with its Targaryen queen and bastard king, its prince a wildling from beyond the Wall, its dragons and its hiding lions and its many-layered families. The North was simpler. Vast and strange and cold and harsh, but simple.

She smiles across the dinner table at Willas, who was greying and starting to get a bit fat. His bad leg pained him in the cold more every year, despite the maesters’ unguents and poultices. He went South a few months of the year to rest and heal, but she only rarely left the North (although when she did, the ride to and from Highgarden alongside Willas was a pleasant enough trek). They would ride hard until the first hot wind hit them, then meander south until Garlan met them on the road. It was nice. Garlan was a good man, kind, and she had been glad when Daenerys had granted him both his life and his lands after the Great War. The problem with going south didn’t lie with Garlan or his sweet Leonette, or with any of the round-cheeked children frolicking around their home. The problem lay with her. She no longer felt comfortable in the hot and muggy South, around its soft Andal people with their wide impenetrable grins. Her skin - once porcelain, once ivory, now steel - had grown too used to the biting winds of winter in the North. Even a mild summer day like this one made her shift in her seat.

At long last, the sun dipped below the walls around the Den. Her neck trembled as the girls (daughters of prominent lords, fostered as both honor and threat, and when she looked at them sometimes she saw Theon’s face) took the heavy crown off her head, polished it, set it safely in its home. Her head ached as though it pinched her still, and she knew her father would have said that it should be so, that the one who wears the crown should feel its weight always, should not set it aside so easily. It still hurt, the memory of the crown, the memory of her father. Sometimes she realized she couldn’t picture his face, couldn’t hear his voice; her mother’s voice had stayed with her but her face had gone; her dead brother’s laugh and her changed brother’s touch, gone as well. When she lay beside Willas in the night, she tried to reach back to feel them around her, to remember, and could get at nothing but darkness. Those nights were the worst, but she fought back, a wolf bitch to the core. She counted lives saved and conflicts averted, children running free and safe, winters endured together. She counted days she had not died, days her sister had not died, days Jon and Rickon had not died, days the Stark name lived on. She counted the good, and tried to put away the bad in the same dark place she held so much of what had happened, and tried, tried, tried to close her eyes and dream.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Calendar Girl" by Stars:
>
>>   
> But I can't live forever, I can't always be  
> One day I'll be sand on a beach by a sea  
> The pages keep turning, I'll mark off each day with a cross  
> And I'll laugh about all that we've lost  
> 


End file.
